To understand why this is happening, you have to go back in history to the end of the slave trade. When the ability to kidnap people from Africa and bring them back to enslave them was legally ended, the white enslavers realized that the only way they could keep slavery going was to force people to breed more slaves. Google that history. It is utterly abhorrent but necessary to understand where the Republican Party is coming from today.

Since the end of slavery, a certain contingent in the U.S. has never gotten over the fact that they couldn’t legally have a sub-class of citizens that they could use for free or nearly-free labor. So they kept trying to find other ways to keep people oppressed, and they expanded that oppression beyond just black people and to any of the “less desirable” groups. Think not just Black people, but also Irish, immigrants, Appalachia. They pit these groups against one another because divided people are easier to control. But the goal is the same - have large groups of people poor for generations who have no other option but to work for slave wages and keep the people at the top very, very rich.

Slavery in the U.S. was a huge economic force, one that a certain contingent (the very wealthy) never got over losing. The next best thing was to create whole groups of people who are desperate enough to work for almost nothing. That’s what we have in this country now. And it works best if those people are constantly putting out more children. That keeps them even more stuck and more desperate, and it keeps a steady supply of cheap labor coming.

It’s no coincidence that they want abortion ended but also want to ensure those same people are continually subjected to sub-standard education, that those same people are “allowed” to send their kids to work (defeating years of progress through child labor laws), that those people are also unable to access higher education, government benefits, or virtually anything that could potentially make their lives better.

I starting using Reddit in 2010 or so when I was going through health issues and was looking for information. I became very active on Reddit over the years, occasionally helping to mod a couple of communities. I am not a hugely “online” person, but I loved Reddit as a source of information and advice from actual real people. Particularly for those of us living with chronic health conditions, Reddit in particular was hugely important.

But I don’t use Reddit anymore. The whole API fiasco was the last straw for me, and I also just didn’t see it remaining a vibrant place full of valuable information. So I deleted my accounts and left. Haven’t been back since.

This is what gets me. Christian Selig pointed out in a number of interviews that Reddit could have easily made this work without alienating a huge segment of their user base. I get this vague feeling lately like CEOs are intentionally trying to tank their products, because no one so well paid could actually act so dumb.

Memmy has more customization options and I’ve found it to work a bit better than WefWef. For me, WefWef has been very sporadic in its functionality, with it sometimes just generating errors and requiring me to refresh.

Here’s my hope as a 40-something who came of age when the internet was just taking off.

I REALLY HOPE this is the push we need to move away from corporate-owned social media. I have high hopes for federated platforms and forums that are much more like what the internet was when it started (but better because now we have mobile devices).

I realize a lot of people see social media as being some evil thing, but we also fail to realize how much good it has done. Marginalized communities have come together online and formed real movements. People living with health conditions have been connected to one another for support and also life-changing resources and care. People who were isolated because of disability found communities.

I would like to see old-fashioned blogs and RSS make a comeback. I’d like to see forums and federated sites like Lemmy take off. I’d like to see social media sites that have been given way too much weight in society collapse. I don’t think government or reputable media outlets should ever be using a corporate for-profit entity as a means for distributing information.

Depends on the app you’re using but usually you just click on the hashtag of interest and then click on the + button or something similar in the upper right corner of the screen. That’s how you do it in both Mona and Ivory.

I like mastodon but the content you see is only driven by two things: the people you follow and the hashtags you follow. Basically, you follow people and hashtags to effectively create your own “algorithm.” Once I understood this and really made an effort to follow both people and hashtags that interested me, my Mastodon feed became way more interesting than my Twitter feed.

I also like the quality of the interactions better on Mastodon. Because of how the whole thing works, you’re not going to get bombarded with horrible stuff in most cases (at least the chances seem to be far less for that kind of thing happening).

But it definitely takes more time and energy to curate compared to Twitter.

If the content gets great enough, that will happen. Going to take time, but it will absolutely happen. Especially with so many people deleting their comments and Reddit having their feet held to the fire with people making complaints about them violating GDPR.

Lemmy, Mastodon, and the entire Fediverse are really what the internet was supposed to be. I am glad to see the pendulum swinging back and I hope it continues. I am mostly really excited about the mobile apps being developed for Lemmy. Those are coming along at lightening speed and I those will be THE THING that makes Lemmy happen.